I write posts for myself. Just kidding? I did start the blog on WordPress so I could keep track of all the hunter resources I would find on the web. Now that baby is here(He is about 2 months old) and I have a full time job, my game time has whittled down to only Saturdays and Sundays. This is a more of a exaggeration. I still play occasionally on the weekday. My raid days are over. My gaming high is limited to one or two 5 mans, which I usually do on my rogue, maybe some dailies on my main, and tiding up some achievements until MoP comes out.

The blog is more like a forth priority after the wife, the baby, and my game time. There wasn’t really much to report. No gear lists to make, no interesting tames, and for whatever reason the beta client did not like me. It’s okay. I didn’t have time to play on the beta and I didn’t feel like doing things twice. So here we are:

I do recommend getting any glyphs that you are missing in your spell book. For your hunter, Vendor your melee weapon if it is soulbound. For any melee class who could hold a relic, or whatever else those lesser classes, like rouges would use, vendor that shit too. I will miss seeing a staff or stick on my back but range weapons just look cooler. What else was on my list? Oh, really start to decide which hunter pets you might want to let go, I take it back, release all but your spirit beasts. BM is supposedly the best spec out there. I would also make one spirit beast a cunning pet for PVP, another tenacity for tanking and solo-fun, and the third one for PVE.

BTW, my brother just told me that the patch is going to take about 6 hours to download. Go figure.

Baby is doing fine. He is about 12 lbs now. I couldn’t have asked for a more loving and caring wife. For a girl who did not want to have kids, she is doing a great job.

I’ll report more later(about the game changes). If you look at my trend of blog posts, I usually report things when they go live.

‘Til next time… (which is hopefully tomorrow, or sometime sooner than 2 months)

It looks like BM and SV are getting buffs. Tempted to go on the PTR to try it out.

Hunter

Beast Mastery

Animal Handler now increases attack power by 30%, up from 25%.

Survival

Explosive Shot base damage has been increased by 16%.

Pet

Thunderstomp now scales from 0.98% of Ranged Attack Power

It even looks like my tenacity pets are getting a buff. Maybe they will be the AOE kings again. Imagine a gorilla solo tanking with a ass stomp animation?

Blizzard give me more. Fix Kill Command’s range, Bestial Wrath’s cool down timer needs to be shorter, increase the damage that the hunter does during The Beast Within, and maybe increase the speed our pet runs by 30% by default.

That should fix our DPS being on the bottom. The frog pic is just some random pic from my phone.

“we limited the use of dragon heads to the helm and chained leathery wings around the shoulders which gives the impression of a skeletal dragon crouching over the Hunter’s upper body. “

Reminds me of the Wrath of the Lich King Collector’s Edition Frosty pet and it resting on your upper body. This is actually a set I’m looking forward to collecting. The look is amazing! I do like the tier sets that do make you look like you hunted for it. So how does the Murloc set fit in? Did we go to Elwynn Forest just to hunt Murlocs? I’m pretty sure someone made a comic about that.

The bonuses so far are:

2P — Steady Shot and Cobra Shot generate double the amount of focus.

4P — Your Arcane Shot ability has a chance to grant 30% haste to you and your pet for 15 sec.

This set bonus just screams BM to me. Since when after patch 4.1 did our pets get buffs? I do feel this is more of a way for Blizzard to test a increase in focus regeneration and haste on Hunters and their pets. Why does the set bonuses scream BM to me? First of all my strongest attack, *cough* Kill Command, as BM is highly dependent on having enough focus required to cast it. The set bonuses will also allow me to reforge away from haste and more in to Mastery or Crit.

In the BM tree there are several abilities, besides Kill Command, dependent on Crit:

Basically you can build your hunter 3 ways(Crit, Mastery, or Haste) without the bonuses. If you manage to get your 4 set bonus for Tier 13, I would focus on reforging into Crit or Mastery. Dropping haste will be good but we still need people to test on the PTR. When the Theory crafters figure it out, I will post.

I did 16k dps in about 2 mins with them macro’d to Arcane Shot, Cobra Shot and Kill Command.

Then did 17.5-18k dps in about 2 mins with them only macro’d to Kill Command. So I got about a 2k increase in DPS by changing my macros. I need to run more tests but I thought my initial test results were astounding. I think we need to do more testing and brain storming on how to improve our DPS. Especially BM since I tested this as BM.

Why?: Because there are so many classes that got buffed up the kester when Cata came out.

Many people will not agree with what Blizzard did because it was there class that got nerfed. What they do not realize is that they are a minority! The entire WoW community has been screaming for these changes. Here are the finalized patch 4.0.6 notes.

Hunters

Aimed Shot weapon damage has been increased to 200%, up from 150%. In addition, the base cast time has been reduced to 2.4 seconds, down from 3.

Arcane Shot damage has been increased by 15%.

Aspect of the Wild, Aspect of the Hawk, and Aspect of the Fox can now be cast while mounted.

Hunters can now use Auto Shot while moving.

Casting Trap Launcher, Distracting Shot, and Scare Beast now cancel Auto Shot when cast. This is to make it easier to crowd control creatures with Auto Shot while moving enabled.

Concussive Shot duration has been increased to 6 seconds, up from 4.

Deterrence now provides 100% chance for melee attacks to miss instead of 100% parry chance. This means that attacks that cannot be parried, notably some rogue abilities, can now be prevented by Deterrence, and the hunter will gain the benefit of Deterrence even if disarmed.

Dust Cloud’s cooldown and duration have been modified to make it closer aligned with Tailspin (same effect, different pet).

Freezing Trap now has a PvP duration of 8 seconds.

Kill Command’s damage has been increased by 20%.

Kill Shot’s attack power scaling has been increased by 50%.

Master’s Call now has a 35-second cooldown, down from 1 minute, and its range has been increased to 40 yards, up from 25. In addition, the visual effect is more obvious.

Wing Clip now has a PvP duration of 8 seconds.

Talent Specializations

Beast Mastery

Animal Handler now provides a passive 25% bonus to attack power, up from 15%.

Marksmanship

Chimera Shot’s overall damage has been increased by roughly 50%.

Wild Quiver (Mastery): Chance for this to trigger per mastery has been increased by approximately 17%.

Survival

Black Arrow damage has been reduced by 15%.

Explosive Shot damage has been reduced by 15%.

Hunter vs. Wild has been increased to 5/10/15% Stamina, up from 4/8/12%.

Into the Wilderness (passive) has been reduced to a 10% Agility increase, down from 15%.

Pets

Pets now have 70% of the master’s armor, rather than a different value based on which type of pet they are.

Shale Spiders now correctly have a special ability (Web Wrap).

Bad Manner (monkey) now properly breaks from damage.

Glyphs

Glyph of Concussive Shot redesigned. It now limits the maximum run speed of the target while Concussive Shot is active.

Hunter Bug Fixes

Aimed Shot no longer ignores the Fire! buff when cast by macro.

Camouflage is now breaking when the hunter’s traps deal damage to a target.

UPDATED FOR 4.0.1: Added in new abilities and buffs. Got rid of the abilities that no longer exist. Sorry the shots I set up on the middle bar is for my BM spec. I might update this post later to include the other 2 hunter specs.

TellMeWhen is a great AddOn. You set it up so that when certain buffs are active, it displays big icons on your screen. If you are using the SpartanUI it also shrinks your action bars which makes them hard to see your shot cool downs. With TellMeWhen you can even display your shots and their cool down timers as big icons.

It lets you pull off your shots with easier timing and reapply your serpent sting when the proc from your tier 10 2-piece or 4-piece set bonus.

How to set up?

TellMeWhen uses the names of the shots, stings, or buffs you want to keep track of when they proc. For the names of the buffs you can get them from Wowhead. Remember the spell that is proc’d by the gear is different from the actual description on the item’s tooltip or name of the buff.

I set up mine going horizontally across covering my toon but in the center of the screen. You could probably set them up horizontally at the top of the screen or even vertically on the right side. It is entirely up to you and it might take some experimentation. When I focus on DPS’ing my tunnel vision sets in so I don’t like haveing stuff like that on the side.

If they are taking up too much space and are just an eyesore configure the bars so they only show when you are in combat.

TellMeWhen is a great addon to keep track of buffs and shots. It is one of the few I recommend. I even took the time to write this blog post. It means something to me. It has helped increase my dps and watch for buffs that are important. I hope it does the same to all you, Young Guns, out there.

Don’t forget to test your procs and shots on the test dummies before you head back into ICC. If the icons don’t pop up on TellMeWhen’s action bar they could be broken because of a misspelled spell or buff, could be the wrong name for the buff, or wrong configuration(Cooldown, Buff/debuff, or Reactive spell or ability).